In my memory, I have never been addicted to anything, at least not for a long period of time, by which I mean more than one week.
AI DID it, over the past year.
Prompt responses, powerful execution capabilities, and broooaaad base of knowledge make it a great friend, colleague, assistant, and advisor, at the same time.
I believe most people, whose ideas come out like a strong fire while their capacity of taking actions is no more than a small bottle of water, have had a similar experience to mine.
It IS super COOOOOL and joyful to enjoy the process in which your ideas get executed and turn into readable products, like papers or essays, in a much shorter time with higher-than-average quality.
When the buzz wore off, I realized that there are still quite a few issues AI leaves behind – issues I can no longer ignore.
The most serious issue, in my view, is the side effects of delegating, or outsourcing, the sentence-level and modular writing to AI. Yes, it can definitely provide a very smooth and readable paragraph or essay, and wrap your core ideas and arguments in it. But when you come back and re-read the texts written by AI, it feels like judging from the outside, rather than having your own thoughts flow out from your own smart little brain. The outcomes may be different, and processes would, I think, differ far more, especially to the writer him/herself, in terms of logical flows, or the organization of your logic. The nuanced meanings in the middle of sentences may be altered by AI, while when you are reading from outside, you may not be able to notice them, which gradually shifts your original ideas to some degree.
The thoughts above bring me to the second point: the nuanced beauty of language use, which can be mastered by human beings only. I am not talking about being a language specialist, but I’d like you to imagine such a case: when you are talking about something, then someone else suddenly says somethings genuinely surprising, like a pun, or a brain teaser. If you ask AI to get you such surprises in language, to be honest, I don’t think it can do it, at least not now. What is more important is the joy of the writer feels in this process, and only at that moment did I realize the motivation, or the happiness that novelists have as they write. Words and language become your tools to carve another micro-world which will, in the end, become a representation of yourself.
I am happy that I realized these issues and decided to get back to writing on my own, with AI functioning only as tutors at a writing center, or spell-checkers before the advent of AI.
Actually, this also brings another analogy to my mind, though I am not sure if it is appropriate: the industrialized products versus the hand-made products. One example is the watch. Many watches we buy on the market are produced in factories, on an assembly line, with every step standardized. But expensive watches produced in Switzerland are mostly handmade.
Another case is food: the industrialized versus natural. Potato chips, waffles, and ice cream are super popular and delicious. These are very typical industrialized foods, and they are deeply unhealthy. The healthy food lives around the edges of the store: raw vegetables, fresh fruits, and fresh meat.
These two examples aren't perfectly parallel, but they share one thing: time that production hasn't compressed. I just want to show that the hand-made or natural food that were once taken for granted and mainstream in our lives have been replaced by highly industrialized stuff. Is there still meaning for those hand-made or natural things? Yes, I think so, and actually I think they will have more value, just like the hand-written texts in the future, which convey the nuanced, undecorated feelings and imperfections carrying personal character, and even a soul.
In any case, I enjoyed using AI over the past year, and I stand by my claim to full authorship of everything I wrote in that period.
The more and more prevalent use of AI to generate content is not limited to text, but also for videos, music, etc. As consumers, we can enjoy an increasing number of cultural products that would have been in short supply in the past. However, such high-quality products will only ever be produced by human beings, and I’m not taking questions.
(The cover is still AI-generated for now, since my drawing skills are still at a beginner’s level. Hopefully I’ll be an amateur illustrator someday.)